


Condemned

by Sharadethia



Series: Towards the Encroaching Darkness [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Long-term recovery, PTSD, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 12:05:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11623155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharadethia/pseuds/Sharadethia
Summary: A character exploration of Arison Shephard.





	Condemned

They weren’t night terrors. Night terrors were for children, not for an N7 soldier. They were only nightmares, she told herself every night when she woke up covered in sweat, her bloodshot eyes darting around, every muscle in her body too-tense. 

When she couldn’t convincingly lie to herself anymore, she could concede slightly: she had had night terrors as a child, but those were different. Those started after Mindoir, after seeing her pregnant mother burn alive, the flames so hot that her skin melted off of her horrified, contorted face.

Before that day, Arison’s nightmares had been like those of any child. She had dreamed of darkness and monsters, and would wake up and run to her mother who would hold her hand and comfort her in the dead of night. Her mother with soft brown curls would tell her that nothing would ever hurt her on Mindoir. They were safe. Her mother with her gentle grasp and warm arms would tell Arison that her father would protect her if anything happened. And the day that Mindoir fell, those nameless terrors that had haunted her earliest years found their names. 

Gone were the silly, hairy monsters that had chased her in the dark. Gone were the large animals with their big, white teeth. Nightmares became night terrors as she watched her mother’s face melt every night, as she watched boiled skin run down her mother’s yellow dress. She could still hear the ungodly screams of everyone around her as she hid in the tree that she had climbed so many thousands of times before. 

Of course, Arison had been rescued from her colonial home. So she lived to wake up every night screaming, disrupting anyone around her. She would sob and scream and thrash and run while still asleep, trying to save her mother and save her unborn sister and save herself. Perhaps it was a small blessing that she didn’t see what happened to her father. It meant that she did not relive his exact death every night. It did mean, however, that her mind took the liberty of providing possibilities when the lights went out and the blankets writhed around her like snakes. 

Did her father die from a bullet? From fire? From blunt trauma? Sometimes when she closed her eyes for the night, she could see his brain explode in front of her as a bullet entered the back of his skull and exited out of his forehead. Sometimes, his flesh melted off too, as he joined her mother and little sister in their fiery graves.

Eventually someone had talked to her, given her sleeping medication, and made her visit a counselor. That had helped somewhat, and the night terrors became infrequent until Arison reached puberty. Then, they blessedly became nothing more than exhausting nightmares. She learned to appreciate sleep once again, particularly through boot camp, where she was so exhausted physically that her brain could formulate no more gory lies to whisper her at night. 

But nothing good could last-- especially not for Arison. When her comrades were slaughtered on Akuze, the nightmares returned with a vengeance. Some people in the military said that they could remember exactly how each of their comrades died, but Arison secretly assured herself that they were lying. She could not remember how her friends had died. Each night she saw a slightly different version of the slaughter as her mind tormented her with every mistake she had made, with every bad decision and misstep that led to her once again being extracted from a planet, the sole survivor of a butchery. 

Akuze was not as bad as Mindoir, at least to Arison’s dreaming mind, because sometimes she could not tell where she was in her dream. Was she a child? A soldier? Was her mother dying or her commanding officer? These were not night-terrors, fortunately, simply nightmares that left her groggily reaching for two or three cups of coffee in the morning. Akuze had not triggered more than the vague memories of a seven year old. Arison did not remember every waking detail like she did when she was young. 

Arison lost Kaiden and had no nightmares. She felt guiltier about that than anything else, but told no one, because there was no one she trusted. She was a woman fighting to get to the top, a woman fighting for respect in what was still a man’s world, even hundred of years after man declared woman his equal. She could not be weak in any way, so she wasn’t. She shed no tears for Kaiden, for her family, for her soldiers, for every life lost in the reaper’s way, not because she felt nothing, but because she did not let herself feel anything.

But she did feel one thing, sickening and familiar, during her time dealing with Sovereign: terror. Arison was not scared of the reaper, or the humans she had to battle. No, it was the husks that shattered her cool reserve, the husks with their dead blue eyes and their too-fast movement. She had known this day would come, ever since boot camp-- that she would find something that would remind her too much of home. She assumed that there would be something that could break her, but that she would survive regardless. She was always a survivor, wasn’t she? 

But the husks were like nothing she had ever seen. The first few on Eden Prime she had shot without hesitation: they were just another pair of bodies charging her. She did not think as she pulled the trigger on her pistol and brought them down. It was was only after she had watched them fall that the horror began to settle in. These things were like the old earth tales of zombies, and they could eviscerate her, and she could do nothing to stop it if she was not prepared. 

So she prepared herself.

She gritted her teeth through the rest of the mission, clenched her jaw, and had her index finger a millimeter too close to the trigger the entire way. No one noticed. Because Commander Shepard was always cold, quick to respond, unfazed by anything they could experience. No one was looking for some lifeless corpses to frighten her. A commander who didn’t seem to shy away from death surely wouldn’t be scared of the dead, they thought, and they were right. She wasn’t scared of the dead; she was scared of the mindless undead, returned to slaughter without thought.

Arison hated reasoning with people. It took up precious time, and time was a commodity she had never been afforded; when push came to shove, however, Arison could negotiate and haggle and persuade with a surprising degree of success. She could convince people to do things, often without violence, and no one needed to die. No lives were wasted, even if every second of conversation seemed to drag on without end. But there was nothing she could say or do to slow the husks but pump them full of bullets and pray that they stayed down. And where they did stay down in her everyday life, as soon as she closed her eyes, they came back. Was it her mother being torn limb from limb or Private Shekall from Akuze? She saw her unborn sister being eaten by the husks, and on particularly bad nights, she could feel herself becoming one of them. 

She would wake up with tears in her eyes, her limbs twisted in blankets, sweating. But these were not night-terrors. These were nightmares, she insisted as she woke up at three in the morning and walked about the ship, acting as though she wasn’t tired. These weren’t night-terrors, she insisted as she began to take the stim pills every morning which were meant only for people in extended combat situations. Night terrors were for children.

Secretly, Arison desperately hoped at the start of every mission that there would be no husks, and almost every time she ended up facing her worst nightmare over, and over, and over again. And as she grew more and more dependant on the stims and slept less and less, some of crew began to notice. They noticed how she jumped at things in her peripheral vision, at blue lights, at quick movements. No one said anything. They knew that Arison would look as calm and cool as ever as she gruffly and convincingly assured them that of course she was fine, that it was her job to worry about her crew, not her crew’s job to worry about her. They had heard such speeches before, in situations where they really had not needed to worry. So they didn’t. 

The only time that Arison rested was when she was dead. Those blessed months when she did not exist, before Cerberus got to her, were the most peaceful time of her life. The enveloping, warm darkness of death was better than even the dreamless, coma-like sleep of boot camp. She thought she had finally earned some rest. 

Then she woke, of course. Because someone always needed her to do something, because she could never have a moment for herself, because she had all the agency in the world and yet none at all. The first night she spent after surviving death, she had more night-terrors, no nightmares. She was helpless, floating in space as husks grabbed her and tore at her, ate her, gashed her, destroyed her. 

One of the benefits of Cerberus work was that she got whatever she needed, no questions asked, and when she entered her cabin in the Normandy SR2, she found a crate of stims. She did not question how they knew about her habit. She hated that someone, anyone knew. But these were more than regulation combat stims-- something Arison found that out the hard way. Normally, she took two of her stim pills at a time. But when she took two of the pills Cerberus had given her, her heart immediately began to pound and breathing became difficult. Arison had spent the rest of the day working out in a manic haze, something the Cerberus crew attributed to her wanting to get her muscles back to their previous strength. Perhaps they thought that she was just excited to be alive again. As the chemicals tormented her already fraying body, Arison wished she was still dead. 

The new stims meant that she could go and go and go and then, when she wanted to, which she almost never did, she could crash. She would take one pill in the morning, one at noon, half of one in the afternoon, and half of one at night if she needed to. If she didn’t take any at night, she collapsed into her bed into complete unconsciousness around 9 pm. If she did take half a pill at night, she collapsed at around 3 am. Of course, this unconsciousness did not mean that she had no dreams. In fact, it meant that her dreams became all the more vivid, leaving her all the more tired the next day. One morning, Arison woke up to find herself huddled in her shower, her pistol by her side. She had no recollection of how she had gotten there.

But they still were not night-terrors, she insisted. When she was a kid, she screamed and ran in her sleep. This was only a little sleep walking. Still, Arison began to triple check that the pistol she kept under her bed was on safety before she went to bed-- at least on the nights that she was conscious enough to do so. 

When her own crew came aboard, one by one, no one noticed a change in their commander-- not that they really expected to see one. The Commander Shepard they had known was untouched by the horror around her, a good leader, an awful politician, and an oddly gracious individual. Death couldn’t touch her, and they knew that. Chakwas knew nothing about the stims, never had, and Arison was going to keep it that way. 

She invited Garrus up to her cabin without hesitation. She had seen in him a similar exhaustion on Omega, a similar acceptance of death, a similar soul, and she needed any support she could get. He was a good man, a good turian, regardless of what he said. Still, she never considered telling him about the stims, packing them carefully away into her desk before inviting him up. He could see her emotional, yes-- but he could not see her weak.

Arison knew that she was going to leave Cerberus as soon as she could, so she stocked up on the stim pills. She sent in a very vague requisitions message which no one would think anything of, and the next time Arison docked the Normandy at the Citadel, two large white cases were delivered to her cabin. 

She had opened them only after ordering EDI to stop monitoring her and to deny all access to her cabin temporarily. Then she had pried off the tape with too-excited fingers and ripped away what cardboard didn’t allow her convenient access. Inside the two crates were packet after packet of the stims. With all the packaging and anticipation and secrecy, this whole charade was a pathetic mimicry of the few Christmases she had spent with her family. Her heart beat in her throat and her stomach clenched with excitement. Arison knew that she needed to be careful. She was a Spectre, sure, or at least had been once, and Spectres were above the law, but the pills with their pure, dangerous potency were surely made of some heavily regulated substance. If anyone found out about her habit, at best she would have to explain herself to the council and get turned over to some therapist and weaned off the stims. At worst, she would have to see Chakwas and Garrus and Tali and all the rest of the crew that respected her so much begin to worry about her, question her, pity her. 

She ended up hiding the pills with Jack’s help. The young woman that Arison saw so much of herself in was more than happy to figure out some ingenious hiding spots in engineering when Arison said she needed to hide personal information from prying eyes. Jack understood Arison’s need for secrecy, so no serious questions were asked.

It was Garrus who first figured out part of what was happening. 

When Arison had brought him and Tali along, while trying to retrieve the IFF from the dead reaper, Garrus had pieced it together.

He had been sniping from his position behind a box with both Tali and Shepard in front of him, both shooting at husks with their closer range weapons. Through his sights, Garrus could see his commander shooting a bit more carelessly than usual. He watched as she began to crouch behind boxes between waves, shaking slightly. He was not particularly concerned, since she had been shaky often recently, and he assumed it was stress, until she pulled behind him and began taking hail mary shots at husks with a gun not meant to shoot further than his rifle. 

Garrus moved forward, changed his weapon, and began shooting at close range, trusting the commander not to shoot him even with panic in her eyes and only a pistol in her hand. Even though she couldn’t even remember to change her loadout to something more powerful, he knew she wouldn’t hurt him or Tali, regardless of how desperate she was.

Afterwards, he said nothing. It wasn’t as though he had a chance to; after the mission, Shepard disappeared into her cabin, and after that threw herself into non-stop world saving. She almost always took him with her on missions after that. He assumed it was because she saw how he charged forward when she pulled back. He was right, of course, but didn’t know it until much later. 

“Suicide” mission was a misnomer, since no one died, but Arison wished that it had been otherwise, if only for herself. The embrace of death had been so peaceful, calm and slow, something Arison was unable to feel now. She longed for it, but she also knew that she had responsibilities. She had said to herself that if she came out of the mission alive, she would cut back on the stims, because it was getting harder and harder to fire her rifle accurately. Garrus had made a joke or two about becoming a bad shot, and Arison had ignored it, but the tremors in her hands was undeniable. She needed to stop.

Of course, when the Normandy came out of the other side of the relay, battered, but safe, with all of her crew intact, Arison had been given some alcohol by one of the crew members. She pulled one of her white pills out of her chest pocket without thinking and discreetly swallowed it down with the bitter amber swill that had been gifted to her. She felt alive when she took the pills. Stopping wasn’t an option.

Then the government grounded her, put her under watch, gave her nothing but a window to see the stars through, and Arison was left without her pills. The moment she was put into restraints and led away from her ship, she knew that an era had ended. She was searched, not thoroughly god bless, and so she was left with two stims. She took both pills within twenty four hours. After that, she began to drink coffee, black, as often as she could. She drank upwards of three pots a day, and it did nothing. She was allowed normal stims, which she rationed out as best she could. 

Cerberus was brilliant, Arison was willing to concede. After leaving them, if she had not been impounded, she would have been forced to either crawl back for more pills, turn to directly illegal routes, or go back to the combat stims which were almost entirely impotent now that Arison had raised her tolerance level. If she hadn’t been impounded, she would have been in a difficult situation; now, she was simply in a desperate one.

When night crept up on Arison, a tumultuous darkness embraced her. Husks filled her mind as she saw them killing her, killing each other, killing her loved ones. Herself floating in space, dead. Garrus, overwhelmed and desperate as husks took consumed him. Tali, crying for help, and Jack blasting her way through a finite number of enemies in an infinite horde. Her mother, a husk now, charging her. Her younger sister, a husk now, consuming her.  
Arison would wake up sobbing, like she had as a child. She would wake to find herself under her bed or hidden in a corner, sometimes with her hands bloodied from scrabbling at walls. She was desperate.

It was easy to get Vega to escort her where she needed to go. The local medic was low-level, knew almost nothing about his job, and was star-struck by the hardened Commander Shepard. When she complained of falling asleep all the time, particularly during the day, and added a hint of frustration in her tone, she was gifted a needle and some bottles. 

This meant that she could survive as she always had. Vega teased her about falling asleep on the job, and Arison allowed him to do so. The more people that believed it, the fewer would question her still drinking three pots of coffee a day as well as taking ordinary stims with her injections.

When the husks came to Earth, Arison’s heart stopped and trigger finger started. Where she normally would have panicked, Arison simply felt numb. Her fingers grew cold, her heart beat in her ears, and she felt her peripherals go. She fired shot after shot. She took down the husks exactly as everyone expected Commander Shepard to. She felt nothing, even as the boy that she had tried to save burnt alive. 

He melted.

Just like her mother.

Just like her sister.

Arison was tired. 

She found her hidden cache of pills untouched and began consuming them faster than she had before. Two pills in the morning, one at noon, two in the afternoon, and after Chakwas was informed about Arison’s “narcolepsy,” she provided Arison grudgingly with more injections. This meant that it was almost impossible for Arison to come down from her agitated state where her fingers danced against every surface, where her eyes darted around as though she were always in combat, where she felt a need to be doing something at every moment. 

Calm only came when she casually grabbed a drink with one of her crew members. She knew better than to drink alone; that would trigger alarms in the minds of her closest friends. No, she always had someone with her. She would drink enough to collapse, and then she would fall asleep in her cabin with unshed tears in her eyes. The stims hardened her and the alcohol softened her, and between the two, Arison knew well that she was a mess.

Her dreams were slower when she drank. She could savour every moment of molasses movement; she would pull her feet up into the almost-solid air with every step, and the dark world would try to render her a part of it. Voices echoed there, even if Arison saw little. She could hear her mother crying her name, sobs bubbling to her lips. She could hear Kaiden, the one person she never had a nightmare about, pleading with her to save Ashley. The last words of everyone in her squad from Akuze echoed gently, like razors caressing her skin.

And the boy still ran.

She was old. She was tired. She was greying, even. She barely caught him every time. And every time, he went up in flames, their tongues not warm, but frigid. Arison woke up cold, panting. These were nightmares, she told herself and readily believed. It was not until she found Garrus again that anyone else knew about the boy and his fate that haunted her. 

Garrus was a welcome distraction with his banter and energy. Arison knew that whatever she told him about herself, he would accept it in stride and without hesitation. After he discovered her nightmares, he made it a point to sleep next to her as much as he could; Arison didn’t know if it actually helped the frequency of the nightmares, but waking up was less horrifying with someone else there to ground her.

He found her when she sleep walked and talked her down when she woke up with panic in her eyes. She did not cry around him, though, not when she was conscious. It took Garrus even longer to learn about her stims, and that was only through sheer bad luck.

Arison had been taking inventory of the wear and tear on her casual uniforms when a small handful of pills fell out of a pocket where she had carelessly left them. Garrus was in the room, talking to her, and the small noise of the pills hitting the hard floor was readily picked up by the turian auditory system. Arison casually brought them into hand only to receive a curious glance from Garrus. She pocketed them, hoping that would be where the unspoken conversation ended, but luck was never on Arison’s side. 

It took Garrus only a moment to piece together the information in front of him; his puzzle-solving skills were the one thing he could thank C-Sec for. He said nothing, though, for a long time, as Arison continued to inspect her clothing. His questions, when they eventually came, were simple, easy enough to answer, and Arison answered as honestly and brusquely as she could manage. He did not tell her that she needed to stop. He did not tell her that she was weak. He simply asked her what she was doing to fix it, and Arison gave him a vague answer about cutting back. He nodded to himself and that was the end of their conversation.

As the end drew near, Arison saw no point in halting her consumption. She needed to be focused to ensure everyone’s safety, and as death after death caught up with her, Arison became numb. 

The Citadel was aptly named, as it became her one haven. Of course, she drank to excess to enjoy it, but Commander Shepard deserved time off, didn’t she? Arison slept with Garrus, drank, and cried in the privacy of the apartment that Anderson claimed he didn’t need anymore. 

When the end came, Arison was thankful. She wrote out her will, suited up, took three of Cerberus’ pills, and threw herself headlong into battle. She couldn’t have counted her kills even if she had tried. By the time she sent Garrus and Tali back to the Normandy and made it towards the beam, she was alive only because of the stimulants pounding through her system. She didn’t even feel pain. She didn’t feel anything as Anderson died, as the Illusive Man died, as she chose to end EDI’s life and the lives of all the geth. She shot the Catalyst and knew that she would end exactly as her mother had. What space station would not blow up? Flames would engulf her, consume her like the boy and her sister, consume her like the husks did in her night terrors. That was the future that Arison consented to, accepted without hesitation. It would all end, her anxiety, her exhaustion, her life with all its sordid pains.

And it did.

For a moment.

Arison gasped back to life under the rubble of the Catalyst, everything inside of her burning, everything outside of her burning, as pain rendered her immobile, and she screamed. There was a god, she knew. There was no other explanation. There was a god, because he had condemned her, and this was her punishment.

**Author's Note:**

> None of this is projecting at all!  
> This was initially going to be an anti-fix-it fic, but then life got busy, so I've edited this to be just the initial character study. I have the first two chapters of the long!fic on my computer, and I love Arison, so maybe some day I'll come back to this. In the mean time, I'm just going to post all my previous Arison writings as a series.


End file.
